A Start

For years I have been thinking about writing. Writing what? Well, writing something, anything. I don’t know. I had just wanted to put my thoughts into words. You know sometimes you are just sitting around, not doing anything, and there are these thoughts swirling in your head. You know they are like a song playing in the background. It refuses to go away and you can listen to it and enjoy it if you concentrate hard enough. People who write, well most of them sit down at a pre decided time, with a pre decided topic, and then write. I guess thats the correct way of writing, but I had wanted to try something new, something different. Trying to hold those swirling thoughts of yours and gripping them long enough to actually express them. Well, thats a task. But I had wanted to try it and here I am writing about something just out of the top of my head. If you do actually have the patience to read it, then please do not be critical. These are just some of my musings...

Well since I was a kid, I guess 11 or 12 years old, one thought or lets say one question had always intrigued me. The question was that “What is the driving force behind happiness?” Sounds weird, huh? Well not really. I will try to explain. I had always wanted to know that what events make a person happy and what amount of happiness do they actually award. Some might say that happiness cant be quantified, but I think it can be, up to an extent at least. I mean we all know that some happenings make us so happy that for days afterwards we glow in elation, whereas some going-ons give us a momentary feeling of euphoria ,but then go away never to be remembered again. So basically the quantification of happiness is based on a time scale, as to how long does a memory of an achievement lingers on with us, surfacing periodically to rejuvenate our mood and granting us moments of true bliss.
What I think is, greater the impact an event has on a persons life, and by impact I mean positive impact, greater is the happiness derived from it. What I have been thinking lately is that change is the keyword to understand happiness. It might sound a bit absurd but I think what truly makes us happy is change, and nothing else. We all want change, we need change. Although sometimes we may resist it, but deep down what actually gives us happiness is change. Well to bolster my theory I would like to put forward a few examples.

Look back and think about the times of your lives when you were most happy. Well it might be when you graduated, or when you met your soul mate, or when you had won a prestigious award, etc, etc. Well, all these events made you happy because they signalled a forthcoming change in your lifestyle. And bigger the change, the happier you were. On graduation you were happy that the next phase of your life was going to begin, wherein you will become a responsible employee for an organisation. Even when you win an award, you are happy because your life changes in innumerable small ways like the newfound respect of your friends and colleagues, the added faith in your capabilities, the increase in your responsibilities, etc, etc.

For a very long time I thought that what made truly happy was differentiation. Differentiating oneself from your peers and asserting your superiority seemed to be the most plausible premise to define happiness. But then I observed that people were not happy because of the assertion of superiority, but rather they were happy because of the changes it brought about in their social image. The happiness was not derived from self, but from the changes observed in others. Would you be happy if you came first in the class and no one knew about it? Well why not? Because then you wont be able to observe the change your efforts have brought about in your peer group.

Many a times we find in life that it settles down into a routine, a grind, which seems to go on and on, day after day. Well at those times we start feeling the lack of happiness. People sometimes wonder that how come successful individuals, who have achieved a lot in their lives, become unhappy and discontented with their lives. Well, why is it so? The answer lies in the same reason, which is the lack of change in their lives. Movie stars, who have been doing similar movies for a decade and even though are successful, become unsatisfied and unhappy because of the same grind being repeated again and again. They are bored of all the attention and adulation. They have done a lot of work, but now it all seems the same. Thus, they have nothing to look forward to. No new changes to grant them happiness. Thats why it is often seen that well settled people at highly successful employment positions opt for a completely new career.

Now the prime question that arises is how do we remain happy throughout our lives? I mean when we were bored in our jobs, we did an MBA. We were bored with our post MBA work, we got married. Bored with each other, we had kids. But there is sure to come a time when we will find our self stagnated, settling down in a grind, with no big changes to look forward to. Then how do you remain happy? I mean I have it all, a good job, a beautiful wife, great kids, but now what. I don’t have anything to look forward to. What do I do? Different people tackle this question in different manner. Some like to live their lives through their kids and embrace the changes in their lives as one of their own. Some people get so immersed in the grind that they completely forget what true happiness was and attain a state of equilibrium with their routine. The routine gives them the will to live and provides some kind of pseudo happiness; such people are completely reluctant to ever get out of their grind. There are also some people who are bold enough to take steps such as a career change or periodic geographical relocation to escape the grind. There are also others who depressed by the lack of change develop vices such as being adulterous and inebriated.

After putting these thoughts of mine on paper I can just conclude by saying that I sincerely hope that all of us have ample dynamism in our lives to keep us truly happy, hopeful and alive till the end of time.